The ongoing coronavirus narrative has dominated every layer of society, whether through news outlets or any kind of digital media. The unintended side-effect? We’ve forgotten about everything else. Climate change does not leave or subside just because our attention has gone elsewhere. The dominance of the coronavirus narrative is one of many examples of the single narrative phenomenon. This entails the disappearance of other stories, leading to the passing of important climatological events without the population at large knowing about them, with the result of a lack of interest and a loss of ecological conscience.
Despite affirmations to the contrary, climate change and its consequences are as important as ever, if not more so. As of this writing, the names available for hurricane naming are done, having used all of the names chosen for this year’s tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. The World Meteorological Organization has begun naming hurricanes following the Greek alphabet, this being the second time in history this has been necessary since 2005. While apparently harmless, the surge in the number of storms forming over the oceans could be a clear indicator of the link between sea-surface temperatures around the world and the number of storms, explaining the surge in quantity and strength of the sea-storms.
Climate change is not limited to hurricanes and storms, being linked to some of the greatest droughts known to mankind. In the United States of America alone, the west is experiencing its second-worst drought in the last twelve centuries, with sources like Science Daily indicating that there will be worse droughts in the future. Despite their very separate geographic locations, similar phenomena have been reported in North Korea and Panama, with North Korea reporting its worst drought in 37 years in 2019, and Panama reporting the Panama Canal is at its driest in its history. Human activity is heavily linked to the growing intensity of these droughts, with a strong apparent relationship between water-intensive farming and the erosion of the land. The bad news is that the latest climate models show more intense droughts to come.
While the different ecosystems have varying concerns, all of them have a deep connection to the local way of life. According to the Pew Research Center, Latin America, Africa and the USA share a deep fear for droughts or water shortages as a consequence of climate change. This widespread fear averages a global 44% of the population whose primary concern regarding climate change regards easy access to water. The link with human activity? The constant release of greenhouse gases through human industrial complexes, leading to a rise in temperature in the air, evaporating moisture from any surface and reducing the amount of rainfalls expected, or, paradoxically, in flooding once rain falls.
There are extreme climate activists who claim humanity’s development model of eternal growth is coming to an end, prognosticating the end of the Anthropocene Era (the era of the humans) within the next century. This is a possibility, because despite the efforts begun by climate scientists to reduce greenhouse gases, fight wasteful practices and change an economy based on the idea that “more is more”, and the well-intentioned treaties signed by most countries during the Paris Accords in 2015, several countries, like Mexico, are injecting taxpayers’ money into fossil fuel producing industries either through the construction of new petrol-extracting facilities like Refinería Dos Bocas, or through pushing for the implementation of “green” energy through the burning of bio-fuel, which in reality only results in higher levels of pollution and a combined use of fossil fuels and green energy as green energy is not as efficient.
Some believe that Covid-19 was the opportunity we had to re-evaluate our collective way of life and make a change for the better. However, sanitary measures are mostly related to an increase in single-use plastics, or a rise in the popularity of companies like Amazon, who for a fee will deliver directly to your house inside large, disposable packages that will only be used once. You are kept safe inside your home, however the biodiversity of the world suffers for it. Both a blessing and a curse, our current model is, unfortunately for us, unsustainable in the long term, and those who find themselves living in climate change vulnerable areas of the world are already seeing the consequences.
On the other side, however, global greenhouse gas emissions have fallen due to the extended lockdowns, although what their long-term effect will be we scientists cannot know for sure. The world is falling far behind in its collective fight against climate change, with the decisions of populist governments to focus on the development of fossil fuels holding us back even more.
Image credit: marcinjozwiak